


the retrofitting of wyvern patience

by Lechatelierite



Category: Pacific Rim (Movies), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Pacific Rim Fusion, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-29
Updated: 2019-09-29
Packaged: 2020-11-07 13:57:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,691
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20818415
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lechatelierite/pseuds/Lechatelierite
Summary: Rose Tico's co-pilot is dead, and she is not at first eager to find she's also drift compatible with a former First Order stormtrooper.





	the retrofitting of wyvern patience

**Author's Note:**

> [Prompt](https://twitter.com/chaosbria/status/1177227405208875009?s=20)   
[Jaeger name generator](https://www.fantasynamegenerators.com/pacific-rim-names.php)

It is 8:15 a.m., seven sleepless hours after the last incident, and Rose Tico is thinking about Jedi.

If only there had been _more _of them. If only they had not disappeared when the Kaiju first appeared, one behemoth force traded for another. If more people could pilot a Jaeger by _themselves_, tapping into some cosmic Force like a handshake reaching up into the sky and something invisible _holding on—_

There would have been twice as many Jaegers to deploy in the last attack. The bombers would not have been so desperate. And—

Rose shakes her head, trying to dispel her thoughts. The circuit scars across her shoulders twinge as skin pulls at bandages. Her hair waves in front of her eyes and she blows it away. The sound seems loud in the training hall. When had it become so quiet? Pilots had been chattering a minute ago, rumors and insults and jokes echoing slightly off the reinforced walls. Maybe the sound had gotten to her, or the smells of sweat and old mats. Maybe Rose had not been lost in her thoughts for long. 

General Leia Organa stands at the front of the room, framed by the rust-red blast doors of the Shatterdome training room. 

“Ready, pilot?” The general asks softly. 

Rose is almost certain Leia only had to ask once. 

She stands up and brushes the tiny grit of dust off her coveralls. The gesture is just a reason not to meet Leia’s eyes yet. The edge of the mat asks Rose: who could possibly replace Paige? Paige was the warrior of the two of them. Paige was the one with a soul like the crunch of their Jaeger’s hydraulics, deep and heavy and moving forward. Rose is a _mechanic_. Sure, she is also a pilot, and they had defended themselves more times than she could count since the Resistance swept them up. Right now, she feels like a mechanic with nothing to fix.

It all happened such a short time ago. Even now, the First Order Jaegers and kaiju are circling ever closer to the hidden Resistance base. The new pilots need to get in their cockpits _now_, but so many pilots are dead that drift testing also has to happen _now_. Even the fact that Rose was rostered as a pilot and not a mechanic for the tens of crumpled Jeagers is a sign of the terrible calculus General Organa and Admiral Holdo are balancing. 

_Rose, _says Paige’s voice in her head. _You can always find me in the drift. _

Rose sweeps a training staff into her hand and steps onto the mat. The other pilots go quiet. The last voice to trail off is Poe Dameron’s, done saying something light and energetic to his copilot, Jess Pava. Rose misses the happiness she always felt among other pilots, but can’t seem to summon it now. 

She looks up. The man who crosses the mats toward her holds his training staff comfortably behind his right arm. A long-sleeved black shirt hugs his strong shoulders. His expression is solemn as he stops near the center of the mat. Rose realizes who he is and her blurry thoughts have one more piece of grim astonishment to hang on to.

_He’s Finn. _The _Finn. _The man who joined the fleet at the same time as the Jedi. The man at Starkiller Base, who helped destroy the superweapon. The man Han Solo trusts. Trusted. Rose is filled with a mix of joy and admiration and grief. It all happened _such_ a short time ago…

“Begin,” General Organa says. 

Finn moves fast. He makes a wide sweep with the staff, and Rose gets inside his range without even thinking about it. She jabs her staff toward his stomach.

Before she can even move her feet to adjust, he spins the other end of his staff up from near the floor and pushes hers away. He follows it with a push toward her throat, the staff held perfectly horizontal in both hands. It’s a suffocating attack, equally good for pinning an opponent against a wall or inflicting enough pain to incapacitate them for just a second. _Now _Rose’s feet know what to do, and she hops backwards and to the side, avoiding the move. 

She _remembers _that throat bar, though. The smell of the Hays Minor mines rises up in front of her. First Order troopers used moves like that to push workers aside as they marched through. 

She holds out a hand toward Finn’s shoulder, the nearest part of him that happens to be facing her. His eyes flick toward her. She could have aimed her staff at his kidneys or the back of his head, but it wouldn’t be right. She isn’t actually trying to _win_; she’s trying to find a dance partner. Now, she is as far from wanting to dance as she has ever been. 

“Wait. Stop.” General Organa will be surprised, but Rose has to do this. “I know that move. You used to fight for the First Order!”

* * *

_Incident _is polite code for kaiju.

No one knows where they came from. No one knows how Supreme Leader Snoke conjured the first one out of the ocean or whether he himself came from that mysterious and horrible place. Some people know that Kylo Ren pilots the stolen Jaeger Panther Epitome alone and summons monsters that walk beside him. Monsters and Jaegers and troopers all stride with heavy steps onto shores whose walls cannot protect them. They breached the Hays Minor mines after digging them in the first place, replacing the dead grass and bleached ground with surging white ocean water. Rose did not see giant hands dig into the ground, but she can picture it as vividly as if she did. 

Since then, she glimpsed Panther Epitome just once: this most recent time, when it was tearing apart one of the Resistance’s mobile bases just before the evacuation to the last and most secret fortress. The kaiju that attacked her there was a sinuous sea monster, vestigial legs studding the long body. Water sluiced between barnacles on its Jaeger-sized sides. 

Rose saw that monster too close. 

* * *

Rose does not hate everyone in the First Order. She does not _want _to blindly hate her enemy, because she believes that is the difference between them. Supreme Leader Snoke and the generals who command his troops? She hates _them_, but she does believe there are good spirits in the children conscripted, or in the desperate people who see reliable credits shine in that oh-so-Imperial armor. She and Paige shared this. 

But she didn’t know Finn, the hero, was actually one of them. And her sister is _dead_, and the light is so, so far away. 

“I used to be!” Finn almost screams. He turns to face her, lowering the staff. The pilots watching in a ring around the mat glance and mutter.

“You _used to be. _And now you’re here. Ready to put us down like those troopers did.” Rose says. She backs off one step, then two. 

“Tico. Finn.” Leia’s crisp voice echoes. “It’s not over.”

Rose looks at her with what she is certain is an agonized expression. _Save me from this. _

But generals are not in the business of saving Jaeger pilots from having to _do their jobs. _It’s impossible that she and Finn would be drift compatible anyway. Not now. 

“Ma’am,” Rose says, and backs away. Finn mutters the same word under his breath at almost the same time. 

They face each other again. He flips the staff into place under his arm in a move that could have been arrogant on someone else but somehow isn’t on him. She has the distinct impression that he doesn’t know any other way to hold it. 

This time, she attacks first. It’s another jab, but she feints and smacks his shoulder. He doesn’t move to the side, and doesn’t dodge with her as if he could anticipate her moves. He takes the hit but does not let it stop him when he lurches into forward momentum, his staff coming across. Two quick smacks as they fence, hands blurring together in front of Rose’s face. 

There is a perfect moment of momentum where she hooks his foot. He pitches forward, and it’s so easy to bring her staff around and slam to a stop just before hitting his temple. He’s close enough to her that he would have one thousand options to counter-attack if this was a real fight. It isn’t. Rose hears Finn’s breath in her ear as she looks up at General Organa, waiting for her to call the end of the round. She doesn’t.

_Make this stop. _

* * *

The First Order was swarming the Resistance base. Kaiju, Jaegers, and armored infantry alike rose from the ocean. Rose and Paige Tico piloted Wyvern Patient, a mech painted gold to match the interlocking pendants around the sisters’ necks. Rey, lone Jedi pilot of the fabled Oracle Infinite, had gone to find her Jaeger’s second-most-recent master. Wyvern Patient did what it, as a heavy bomber, was supposed to do: locked its legs near the shore and fired depth charges and concussion missiles into the waves. First Order troops and mechs darted around them. 

Rose was paying so much attention keeping their Jeager out of the kaiju’s mouth that she did not at first notice they were the last bomber standing.

Then the kaiju hit on the right side. Wet, ocean-green flesh slapped against the cockpit. Tiny, flat legs and claws scrabbled against metal.

“It’s trying to squish us!” Rose yelled.

Paige stabbed out twice, sending more bombs. For a moment Rose hung still in the harness, identical to her sisters’, that allowed her to control the Jaeger. She could feel Paige’s calm concentration. Her thoughts were not racing like Rose’s were. She was in her element. But she was so focused, and—

“Bomb doors jammed,” Paige said. She was still so calm.

_I’ll have to unblock them manually_, Paige was thinking. That meant she would have to exit the cockpit, leaving the Jaeger motionless and under heavy and immediate attack.

Rose scrabbled with the Jaeger’s arms at the encircling monster, but could not get purchase on its skin. She did not hear the words, but she understood the impression in the drift. Memories of their home city swirled between the sisters, blue-tinged and grim as history. Other memories: of the sisters hugging, the way Rose’s chin fit snug against Paige’s shoulder. Of the familiarity of the room they used to share at home, and the one they shared now in the forward base. Neither of them had slept in a different room from the other for more than a day before.

Rose reacted before her sister could say the words. “No! It’s…it’s dangerous!”

Paige unclipped her harness.

_All of this is dangerous_, Paige was thinking.

“What about the monster?” Rose sputtered helplessly. Paige squeezed the pendant around her neck.

Paige crossed the cockpit and picked up a sword.

The machete-shaped blade was an emergency rescue weapon, intended more for cutting food in a desperate survival situation or levering broken metal out of a Jeager than for attacking. But if Paige was going out onto Wyvern Patient’s golden surface, she needed _something. _She looks so heroic, Rose thought. She looks like a Jedi raising a lightsaber.

Rose turned her attention back to the configuration of the battlefield. The troopers wouldn’t stop just because they were almost certainly going to win. Panther Epitome had swept past what had once been the bomber screen and ran perilously close to the forward base. A tiny alert in the corner of her screen, which she had not seen before, told her the officers had already evacuated. The battle was lost. While Paige had been preparing to fight outside her Jaeger, General Organa had escaped to fight another day.

_Good._

Rose tried to reach out for Paige.

A crunching echoed through the cockpit. Aftershocks sounded, the dull thunks of crumpling metal. The wall to Rose’s right crumpled, then turned into the barnacle-crusted skin of the enemy kaiju. Sparks bled out of severed bulkheads.

Something in the drift _snapped._

The kaiju threw the mech toward the shore.

Rose rocked in her harness, the world sloshing up and down around her like a ship in a storm. Another crunch. The world stilled, Rose stilled, and orange light washed against her helmet. _Fire—_there was _fire _in the cockpit— She fumbled for her harness and kicked free of the foot pedals.

“Paige? Paige?” Where the other side of the cockpit had been was just a mess of fire and tortured metal. Dimly, Rose remembered seeing Paige fall into the gulf created by the first attack. She fumbled for her pendant while she tried to stagger her way through the maze of ground-level detritus the Jaeger’s face had become. There—an opening. Natural light. There—a psychic scar, an empty place where Paige’s presence had been. They had shared so many memories. They had hardly desynchronized for a second the first time they drifted, because memories were _easy—_they had so many of the same ones. Ever since she had become a pilot, Rose had lived her life twice at once.

Until now, when she remembered what it was to be alone.

Rose levered a piece of Wyvern Patience to the side and fell to her knees on cold sand.

* * *

Finn rolls out of the lock. Rose turns with him, and for a moment this _does _feel like the dance a drift is supposed to be. They trade blows again, knowing as if the match has been choreographed when the other is supposed to move. Hisses around the edges are the indrawn breaths of pilots who know how this goes, know what this looks like, and have seen too many of their partners die. 

“I used to be.” Finn is out of breath. It doesn’t surprise anyone that he started the sentence without prompting again, as if he already knows Rose’s memories.

“You’re wasting our time, forcing us to trust you—"

“I didn’t. If I could have saved Rey by saving the Resistance base, I would have, but I couldn’t. Nobody could.”

“Sure,” Rose said sarcastically. Paige at least tried, and for the right reasons.

“We need more pilots, Rose. You felt the drift just now. We can be compatible. But you have to trust me.”

“You mean that, about Rey?”

“I can’t make you believe me. But Rey is our best hope, and … I would do anything to help make sure there’s a Resistance for her to come home to.”

In her mind/memory/drift Rose heard Paige say something new. _Rose, that’s a real hero. Knows right from wrong and doesn’t run away when it gets hard._

Rose sighed. She trusted Paige completely. And she wanted, so badly, to trust that the new Jedi would make a difference. If Finn was on her side … maybe it was worth trying this.

“One more try,” Rose said.

“Okay,” Finn said. Behind him, Rose nodded.

This time, they danced. The fight accelerated into something fluid. Poe Dameron and Jess Pava whistled. The relief in the room was a shock. If there were not enough drift compatible pairs left to pilot even the repaired Jaegers, all would be lost so much faster than it would otherwise. Maybe the apocalypse would still take all of them. But, with a new pair confirmed, now they would have a little more life beforehand.

When the drift or the Force or the energy between Finn and Rose decided it was over, they turned to Leia.

She clapped her hands. “Good,” Leia said. She knew how to inject warmth and authority into even one word.

Rose smiled and glanced over at the man beside her. Finn was nervous. She could see that now that she wasn’t noticing the way he moved like a stormtrooper. Both of them were nervous, but both of them were _together._

_Where are you, Paige?_

_ I’m here_, came the impression/voice/sense. _I think Finn will get along with us just fine_.


End file.
